When talent acquisitions leaders were strategizing for 2020 they could not have anticipated the rapid changes that would occur in the candidate market. On March 11th 2020, the World Health Organization officially proclaimed COVID-19 a worldwide pandemic and the industry saw a sudden shift in the job market.

The demand for workers in healthcare, consumer goods and logistics jumped across Europe and the USA. This was inflated by the knock-on effects of a boost in online shopping, buying in bulk and increasing cases of COVID-19. For the talent acquisition lead it meant everything planned, along with the go-to playbook, was thrown out the window. Communication with job seekers and candidates was now more important than ever. 

In preparation for the influx of corona queries, enterprises such as Airbus, McDonald’s, Deutsche Telekom and other clients utilised their recruitment chatbot to automate communication with job seekers and candidates by creating coronavirus categories. 

Job Seeker Study Results

6 weeks after the announcement, jobpal’s data analysts gathered all 600 COVID-19 related questions that job seekers were asking in order to gain a better understanding of their behavior. These are the results:

• 47% of chatbot end users wanted to know about the company’s reaction to COVID-19. With queries such as “What are you doing to protect your employees from COVID-19?” and “How are you dealing with the Corona crisis?” 
• 23% of chatbot end-users had hiring-related queries such as “What is going to happen with my application due to corona?” and “Can I apply despite Corona?”. 
• 11% of chatbot end-users asked interview related questions such as “Will my interview be impacted by coronavirus?” and “Do all applicants get a new appointment for tests and video interviews?”. 
• 10% of chatbot end-users asked a range of other questions that surrounded the business rather than around hiring such as “How do I get food from you despite COVID-19?” and “When do you close because of coronavirus?”. 
• 7% of chatbot end-users wanted to know more information about the COVID-19 virus itself and had queries such as “I am worried about COVID-19 what should I do?” and “Give me information on corona”. 
• 2% of chatbot end-users asked about what will happen after the COVID-19 crisis – “Will you hire after the coronavirus?”.

Learnings from the Job Seeker Study

What’s an interesting takeaway is the volume of queries in certain areas. For example, company reaction is almost half of the total queries registered. This shows that job seekers across the board are most likely to ask questions about the company’s response to the pandemic. It’s clear that to see the need to communicate the business’ stance on COVID-19 is a must. 

Hiring related queries take up 23% of the dataset – an interesting result which can tell us a lot about the candidate market. It could be that the volume of the queries relates to the concerns at the forefront of the job seekers mind. Stability and security could see less movement in job roles as talks of economic downturn continue. 

“Can I do a video interview instead of a normal interview?” – video interview questions populate a large portion of the 11% interview related questions. It’s no secret that interviews made the move to virtual platforms over March, and it could be seen as the new normal for candidates and recruiters. Another hypothesis around this category is that the majority of those asking questions are candidates who are already in the pipeline.  

The “Other” category consists of queries that relate to business operations. This could suggest that even if a job seeker is inquiring about a position they can also ask about the business from a consumer perspective. In a similar light, 7% of queries regarding the Coronavirus can also be perceived from a consumer standpoint. Post-COVID 19 makes up the smallest portion of the queries, which can tell us that during that period very few job seekers could see past the pandemic. 

Conversational AI technology equips talent acquisition teams with the ability to communicate effectively in their employer brands’ tonality 24/7. Consequently, automating this part of the hiring process provides the TA team’s time-back to focus on more urgent tasks, retrieve data insights from their candidates and increase engagement. Automation’s ability to drive efficiency in recruitment and time-saving capabilities is one of the reasons why the demand for AI in recruitment has shot up to 36% in 2020, compared to 7% in 2019.  

Enterprises such as Airbus and Deutsche Telekom have proved successful with automation in their hiring process with a positive impact on efficiency, candidate engagement and experience.

Detailed reporting is being phased out by dashboards, bringing new focus on key recruiting metrics and how to leverage them in the C-suite.

Modern organizations realize that data should lie at the heart of an organization’s decision making. As such, today’s talent acquisition leaders are expected to measure their hiring teams’ recruiting performance, compare against benchmarks, and make quantitative improvements. This means CHROs not only need strategies and tools for capturing and analyzing data, but they also need to understand what recruiting metrics and key performance indicators actually mean.

Building benchmarks can be a daunting task without prior experience working with data sets. The data doctors at Namely are experts at building benchmarks that generate useful, company-specific insights into company talent health. Find out the details of how they build benchmarking packages that give TA the ammunition they need in the boardroom.

Traditionally, human resource (HR) and talent acquisition (TA) leaders relied on admin-generated reporting for insights into metrics like time to hire, time to fill, and cost per hire. According to a recent webinar presented by The Association of Talent Acquisition Professionals (ATAP), practitioners are now moving away from text-heavy reporting in favor of visual KPI dashboards, with a renewed focus on summarizing important data and effectively communicating it to the right people so they can make better decisions. ATAP polled webinar attendees and discovered that 50 percent of TA practitioners already have a dedicated dashboard at their organization. For organizations that currently do not have a dashboard, 38 percent are actively planning and/or building one.

When using KPI dashboards, ATAP argues that TA leaders should shift their attention towards metrics that truly matter to their businesses. For most organizations, important metrics to consider fit within the framework of cost (Hiring Budget), speed (Hiring Velocity) and quality (Net Hiring Score)—what we at SmartRecruiters call Hiring Success.

Identifying these metrics is an important first step, but how can TA leaders create Hiring Success at their organizations? ATAP stresses the importance of reinforcing cultural practices surrounding data interpretation and integrity to maximize the impact of KPI dashboards. In turn, these efforts will strengthen TA’s presence in C-suite conversations and critical business decisions.

Data Interpretation

Traditional reporting offers a high degree of detail but also requires substantial analysis for interpretation. As a result, even though everyone may have access to the same report, their understanding of the data can differ greatly. Providing context to help stakeholders understand the data is necessary, and KPI dashboards offer a more digestible summary of important metrics in a way that our brains can easily understand (50 percent of the human brain is devoted directly or indirectly to vision).

More important than the numbers, however, is education and communication. Every TA team needs to establish benchmark performance metrics and educate stakeholders on normal variations in the data. TA leaders are responsible for helping recruiters and HRBP understand the dashboard mechanics, how it works and why it matters in order to foster a data-driven culture at work. Put another way: TA leaders should focus on behavioral training rather than the dashboard itself.

Data Integrity

“If it’s not in the ATS, it didn’t happen,” says webinar host Kristy Nittskoff, Founder of Talent-Savvy, a recruitment strategy optimization consultancy. Implementing a single system of record is useless if employees work outside of it. Encouraging employees to log all hiring actions in the ATS in order to track and measure accurate data is critical. Moreover, KPI dashboards use data from the ATS to build out metrics, and incomplete data can skew the results, leading to inaccurate interpretations, poor business decisions— or, worse, violate compliance laws, which currently cost US companies an average of $222 million annually.

Recruiters, admins, and other ATS users are ultimately responsible for logging complete and correct information, thus mitigating problems associated with dirty data. How important is clean data? According to one study, a strong organization that uses clean data can generate up to 70 percent more revenue than its average counterparts. Otherwise, it’s garbage in and garbage out.

Impact of Data

The primary purpose of collecting data is to inform business decisions. More high-quality data translates into insights around whether or not a current talent acquisition strategy is working. TA leaders can then iterate, update, or revise processes according to what the data suggests.

SmartRecruiters sent customers a recruiting ROI survey last year and gained key insights into critical metrics surrounding candidate experience, hiring manager engagement, recruiter productivity, budget, hiring velocity, and quality of hire. These metrics demonstrate the measurable impact TA has on an organization and reiterate the importance of data as a powerful negotiation tool.

Given the right leverage, data can support requests for more resources or headcount for talent acquisition. Alternatively, data can protect TA teams, pinpointing problems with the hiring process that exist outside of TA’s control. For example, if data shows hiring managers are unresponsive, thus hurting the organization’s hiring velocity, it’s likely not TA’s fault.

Data Culture is Key

LinkedIn’s Global Recruiting Trends 2018 found that 50 percent of hiring professionals rank big data as a major part of their strategy, but TA leaders have long struggled with finding simple and effective methods of communicating performance metrics to executive leadership. Recruiting KPI dashboards signal a change in how TA can prioritize the data that truly matters to their organization, and how to present the information to important stakeholders in an impactful way. These tools, combined with a strong data culture in the workplace, best prepare TA leaders to enter the C-suite with data-driven confidence.

Even if you live under a rock, in the middle of a dense forest, surrounded by a desert wasteland, you still know that recruiting is now a mobile game.

The average person will spend over four hours on their devices each day. If you assume the recommended eight hours of sleep, this means that 25 percent of a peron’s waking day is spent on a mobile device. The majority of this time is eaten up by browsing social media (over two hours, according to Statista) and firing off an endless stream of texts (almost a half hour each day).

That said, people do use their mobile devices for more practical tasks as well, including searching for jobs. A 2014 study performed by Censuswide, and funded by Indeed.com, found that 65 percent of people were using mobile devices while looking for new jobs. This number grew as high as 77 percent in younger age brackets.

This is a staggering majority that cannot be overlooked by recruiters. Mobile recruiting, while still a relatively new trend, is a vital branch that needs to be incorporated into any company’s hiring strategy.

Unfortunately, the infancy of this trend means that recruiters are still forming their understanding of the best practices when approaching mobile users with career opportunities. To help facilitate that learning, here are three mistakes that organizations need to avoid when approaching mobile recruitment.

Check out SmartRecruiters mobile recruiting here!

1. Failing To Adapt Job Posts To The Mobile Environment

Convenience is one of the most common reasons cited for job seekers turning to mobile. The same Censuswide, Indeed.com survey found that convenience was the number one motivator for mobile job searchers. That convenience is severely damaged when recruiters fail to adapt their job posts to the mobile environment. With smaller screens and touch navigation, mobile users have vastly different browsing behaviors from desktop applicants.

Your mobile recruitment posts need to provide the necessary information to entice applicants and ensure that they understand the position, its duties, and the requirements. But, too much information is overwhelming for mobile users that are staring at a much smaller screen. Not to mention, these individuals have notoriously short attention spans.

UPS has been a leader in online recruiting for nearly two decades. Realizing that browsing social media and watching videos are two of the most common mobile activities, they made sure to target Facebook and Twitter users with job posts and incorporate videos, instead of large blocks of text, in their job descriptions. This allowed them to reduce hiring costs from $600-700 to just $60-70.

2. Lacking A Mobile Career Portal

Alongside their social media and video-enabled mobile recruitment, UPS also leverages a mobile app designed to be a communication channel between the company and applicants. Both sides find value from this addition to mobile recruiting. Applicants can ask questions and receive additional information vital to their hiring.

UPS, on the other hand, can use these initial conversations to more accurately target the right employees for interviews. This has had a dramatic impact on improving their interview-hire ratio to 2:1.

In short, offering some mobile career portal, or app, that enhances your mobile recruitment is a huge advantage. This is especially true with younger applicants in the millennial generation because these job seekers are so mobile-centric.

3. Forgetting to Track Results

Data has become an invaluable and unavoidable tool in today’s always-connected world. We’re producing data at absolutely wonky rates. In one report from 2017, there was a total of 2.7 Zettabytes of data in the “digital universe.” Translated into gigabytes, let’s say it is a lot of zeroes, with more being added every second.

If you ask your marketing department how much they use data to inform decisions, they’ll likely talk your ear off. So, why not incorporate data into your mobile recruitment strategies? If you aren’t continually testing your job postings, in terms of message and channel, then how will you determine what’s working? Mobile users search differently, which means they may be using different keywords than expected to find job posts.

Google’s People Analytics team (a Google-ized name for their HR department) used data from their past interviews to determine what questions and practices in their hiring process yielded high-performing employees. They found that specific tactics, which they long presumed were effective, actually added no value to the equation. Thus, they removed them from their hiring tactics.

So…

These mistakes can be crippling to mobile recruiting, but they are very avoidable. By spending more time analyzing your mobile recruitment efforts and creating hiring experiences that are designed for the mobile user, you’ll see more, qualified applicants entering your onboarding process.

We talk people analytics with the TA leader breaking down big data at Hiring Success 19, February 26-27 in San Francisco.

Chris Louie, Senior Director of Talent Acquisition for LinkedIn, didn’t start out in TA. Four years ago this recruiting leader was a product marketer rising through the ranks of Nielsen, the NY-based global performance management company. So, when Chris announced his move to the company’s people function, everyone had the same reaction.. ‘But, why!?’

Where Chris saw an opportunity for innovation and an unscripted future, the rest of the world saw a department with a reputation for being the most corporate of all the corporate functions, ie a dusty snoozefest. As one recruiter so delicately put it “The pros are that you would be part of a new generation of HR leaders; the cons are that HR is still dramatically underpaid and disrespected as a function!”

Yet, none of this well-meaning guff deterred Chris. He saw how critical talent was to business success, and he thought, “If I can effect change in TA, it will really make a huge difference to the organization as a whole.”

Chris didn’t know it at the time, but he was actually part of a larger trend of outsiders entering this once insulated field. And, as it often does, his outside experience informed his new work in positive and unexpected ways. Chris began approaching the challenges of HR with the mind of a product marketer, leveraging his penchant for analytics, and working backwards from the desired end point to find solutions.

After three years as Nielsen’s Talent Acquisition and People Analytics, Chris began a new chapter at LinkedIn, taking with him his love of experimentation. Ahead of his session ‘Impact of Analytics in Recruiting’ at Hiring Success 19 – Americas, February 26-27 in San Francisco, we catch up with this industry changemaker to hear what it’s like to be at recruiting’s premier brand, and why HR needs its own Hippocratic Oath.

What have your first couple months at LinkedIn been like?

I’m part of the talent acquisition team here at LinkedIn. I’m not going to lie, it’s a pretty awesome team…and you would hope so given the brand reputation, right?

At LinkedIn, I am leading the teams that support all of our recruiters, helping them be their best for our hiring managers and candidates. This includes inclusion recruiting, talent attraction, candidate programs, platforms and assessments, project management, and feedback to the LinkedIn product team – so they can make our solutions better both for LinkedIn TA and the broader industry.

You once wrote that TA systems need product managers, not administrators – could you explain this idea?

Software companies don’t just develop a product for clients and walk away. They market the system, support their customers, and think about user experience – honing and evolving solutions over time. However, there’s a tendency to not view internal systems as ‘real products’ and instead just roll them out to employees with no marketing or customer success. That’s why when you look at the NPS of internal systems it’s typically quite low.

My thought is, that we need to bring the same marketing, support, and tracking efforts to these internal systems as we would to the products we deliver to our customers. Internal systems are ‘real products’, and they are critical to business success.

Tell us more about your session at Hiring Success 19 – Americas, what will practitioners walk away with?

The approach I take to people analytics is basically the scientific method. What is the problem statement or challenge that we’re trying to solve? The answer to that question dictates what you should do from an analytic perspective. Start with what you’re trying to accomplish instead of ‘what analysis can I run?’

I really love marrying analytics and talent acquisition, because you can use insights to make decisions and improve processes that payoff immediately. At the end of the day we’re not running analytics to write papers or sit on panels. This is about boosting the experience for everyone – candidates, hiring managers, and recruiters.

All that said, people analytics is still fairly underdeveloped, and only recently have we attained ready access to the data we need. The catalyst has been the digitization of our workflows and the adoption of HR tech that puts capturing data and enabling analytics at their core. But there’s still a ton more we can do.

People tend to be intimidated by the idea of creating an analytics program, do you have to be a math whiz to make sense of your data?

Anybody who’s intimidated by the math of it at all should know it’s really not about the math. We can hire statisticians or programmers to do that. What’s hard is finding people who understand the way HR and TA work today and can identify the real problems and challenges, as well as the root causes.

Could you describe your personal brand in three words?

I guess I would go with connect, care, and create.

Connect: Competing initiatives often pop up in complex organizations and ideas get lost in the shuffle. I strive to be close enough to what’s happening on the ground but also understand enough of the broader narrative to help bring things together – projects, people – so we can accomplish things instead of working at cross-purposes inadvertently. I really enjoy making connections, so that everyone gets to contribute instead of feeling their time has been wasted.

Care: At a really fundamental level, I think the ultimate job of a leader is to help his or her team succeed. And so, when you spend time with anyone on your team, you should spend more time trying to be interested than interesting. I love problem-solving, and anytime I meet with someone on my team, I try to understand what challenges they’re facing and ask how I can help. I’ve been able to progress in my career because people have shown they’ve cared about me. I hope I’m able to pay that back by doing the same for others.

Create: I’m always at my best when I’m trying to create something new or take on a challenge that’s stymied others. If you have the perfect system in place and just need someone to maintain it, then I’m probably the wrong person for the job. I’m continually looking for a fundamentally better way to do things instead of just going through the motions, which is probably one reason why I’ve made relatively dramatic career moves across multiple functions, instead of just progressing linearly in one.

In the wake of the #metoo movement, you suggest HR leaders create their own Hippocratic Oath. Tell us what yours would be.

I believe HR should adopt the ‘do no harm’ credo when it comes to the employees they support. While the impression some have is that HR is naturally “the people’s function,” the reality is that practically (given relatively large ratios of employees to HR people) it’s much more aligned with leaders. I think as an industry, we should consider whether HR should have an official responsibility of employee advocacy, which could call for creating a structure where it can have some independence from the leadership – like reporting to the Board. It might be a radical idea, but I think it still merits a discussion.

On a personal level, I guess, my Hippocratic Oath be as an advocate for my team and the candidates.

It’s important to not fall into the trap, as a manager, of viewing your team member’s work in an overly transactional way. That means continually seeing how the people working for you are growing, knowing what their professional goals are, and helping set them up for a positive trajectory. That “care” thing again.

I name candidates as well because they are often the voiceless in the recruiting process. If someone is having a negative candidate experience, they can feel alone and really have no recourse. There’s the one-in-a-hundred candidate who will get an email through to the CEO or CHRO and elicit some action, but that’s pretty rare. Given the numbers, candidates can sometimes get lost in the shuffle unfortunately. You really need to pay attention to this and safeguard the candidate experience and our sense of responsibility to them. At LinkedIn, candidate engagement and experience is extremely important to us, and it’s one of the KPIs we measure to gauge our success.

Meet Peter Hetherington, the Recruitment Director at Link Asset Services and a self-proclaimed ‘dataholic’. Peter is known to say he’d choose good data over employer brand any day. Though he acknowledges both are ultimately necessary. “Data is foundational to success,” he remarks, “and no amount of tinkering with interesting things like employer brand will make up for missing or inaccurate management information.”

Link Asset service left Capita almost two years ago. This acquisition meant separating from a company of 70 thousand to operate as a three-thousand person entity within the new organization. Peter started from square one at his new employer. He was a team of one, with no tools but his email. His sole focus in those first weeks was to build out his team – people needed to be hired and fast.

Peter set to work hiring a stellar team, most of whom are with him to this day. His second order of business was to implement an applicant tracking system (ATS). He chose SmartRecruiters Talent Acquisition Suite (TAS), and – in just four weeks – the system was running and Peter was collecting data.

Data is, was, and will always be a must for Peter, and here’s why: Data transforms managers into leaders, improves the quality of conversations, enables him to question conventional wisdom, and allows his team to learn from the past to predict the future.

Overall, it helps him see what’s happening, form a plan, and sell that plan to internal stakeholders. Yet, even when the data is there, it can be a challenge to organize it in a way that speaks to your leadership. The term ‘the board’ makes this committee seem like a homogenous mass, when really it’s comprised of many parts, each with unique objectives, concerns, and insights.

The CEO has an eye for expansion and growth, the CFO is concerned with wise spend, and bottom-line targets… the list goes on. Peter takes us through the top five points your data should address, in order to align executives with hiring success.

Watch Peter’s presentation from Hiring Success 18 – Berlin below, and be sure to register for Hiring Success 19 – San Francisco for more great content like this live!

1)

Governance

Recruiting is critical to the development of an organization. So, the way your team manages the “floodgates” is all-important. Leadership needs to know your TA strategy promotes the desired organizational structure.

2)

Management Information

Who doesn’t love a good dashboard? Use your data to build dashboards so your leadership can easily view your department performance in real time.

3)

ROI

Return on investment is an obvious metric to include when presenting the board, though it can be hard to demonstrate in a palpable way. Remember to frame everything as an investment (because it is), not a cost. Use your past data to justify future investment. How many more hires were you able to make after expanding your team? Use that info to demonstrate why you want another recruiter on board.

4)

Process Excellence

Showcase the excellence of your team, including their ability to hit targets and communicate with other departments.

5)

Forecasting

Share your projections of who you need to hire and how you arrived at that conclusion – again, using your data. Then give some context as to whether the market can supply that need and the amount of resources your team will require to reach that goal.

Case Studies

Organizational  Structure

Link went from a large company to a much smaller and more agile organization. The leadership of this new Link iteration wanted to make sure that each new hire was strategic, thoughtful, and fed into the new management structure they had laid out for their company. One of their main targets was to ensure managers only oversaw 3-10 people directly – any less or more found to be ineffective for the business needs.

To support this management initiative, Peter and his team implemented conditional fields to alert when a hiring manager opened a new role in the SmartRecruiters system. The system would ask how many people the new role managed, and if the number was outside the ideal window the hiring manager would be asked to provide a business case to justify their decision.

Before these conditional fields, hiring teams would reach offer stage only to have the scope of the role called into question and, at times, would have to start from scratch with a modified version of the role. This small tweak of adding conditional fields ensured the board that proper governance was in place to make smart hires in line with business objectives.

Resource Allocation

Another aspect of their organizational restructuring was reallocating office resources. Leadership wanted to encourage collaboration through open offices, and move more workers to their suburban campus as opposed to their city campus, in response to Dublin’s skyrocketing rents.

Employing the same tactic of conditional fields, hiring managers were asked where new roles would be located. If the job was located in Dublin, hiring managers were then asked to present a business case for hiring an employee there. The hiring team could then immediately forward these requests to the right people to approve.

Now, candidates aren’t surprised by a sudden change in job location, and the leadership knows that the hiring team is helping the meet the company ’s fiscal goals.

Contractors

Contract workers are often the highest uncontrolled spend for businesses. Hiring managers often prefer using a contractor over hiring a full-time employee, as the latter takes much more time and effort to source and onboard.

To ensure that hiring managers aren’t leaning on freelancers too much, Peter and his team use conditional fields once again to compare the merit of contractor versus full-time employee. Questions like, Where does this budget for this role come from? Does this position need to be interviewed? Is this a new role or an extension? and, what is the equivalent salary of a permanent person?, helped the TA team manage the company’s contingent workforce with greater efficiency and prudence.

Facility Management

What’s worse for candidate experience than arriving for the first day of the job only have no desk, no chair, and no laptop. Most people have seen this situation at least once in their company and aren’t keen to repeat it.

With larger organizations, these small details can fall through the cracks. That’s why the TA team at Link makes hiring managers think about supplies beforehand. As part of a new req the hiring manager must submit supply requests. The hiring team then sends facilities a weekly report with the needs of the new hires, instead of frantic managers calling daily.

We are mere days away from the European Union’s game-changing data privacy legislation. If you’re in Talent Acquisition, your first question is whether your ATS is a strength or a liability.

For citizens of the European Union, the General Data Protection Legislation (GDPR) will protect and enforce how their private data is used and stored online, anywhere in the world. In the wake of the Cambridge Analytica/Facebook scandal and growing malaise about online organizations monetizing user profiles, new rules from Brussels are, for once, largely welcome by netizens.

For companies that do business with the EU, or employ even one EU citizen of 500 million, becoming GDPR-compliant before May 25th has been everything from a mild headache, a few extra legal bills, to a complete overhaul of how customer/employee data is stored.

Whether in Europe or elsewhere, you may have noticed several changes to your favorite sites and platforms’ Terms and Conditions recently. Not that you went and checked. Everyone from Facebook to Twitter to LinkedIn has been emailing, and with various shades of marketing-speak, asking you politely and humbly to update your service agreements. And GDPR is the reason.

Talent Acquisition leaders, has your Applicant Tracking System done the same? If not, you could be in trouble. And with maximum penalties for non-compliance set at 4% of last year’s annual gross, or €20 million, whichever is higher, those who’ve ostriched themselves from the hassle could potentially face bankruptcy.

A whopping 70% of those surveyed said they weren’t ready for GDPR, and a lacking, lagging ATS is as big a part of the problem as human indifference.

HR and Recruiting are the great crossroads of GDPR. Our business is based on collecting and analyzing personal data, so we have to be extra-vigilant. Now that GDPR is real, SmartRecruiters (in GDPR terms, the Data Processor) wanted to see if everyone, or anyone, in the field had put in the same amount of work we have into being GDPR compliant. We surveyed a group of 30 TA professionals who use various ATS vendors, to see how clear they were on GDPR compliance and where they may have missed some details. The results were, well, not great.

But don’t freak out just yet. Let’s start with the basics. GDPR requires TA departments (the Data Controller) to store information on candidates (Data Subjects) with their consent. This could be a fix as easy as adding a second T&C button that gives you permission to store their data, which, by them wanting to send you their CV in the first place should be fine. GDPR just means you have to have their clear and unambiguous consent, and if they ever ask you to delete their data, you have to be able to prove you have. Easy enough, but 32% of respondents didn’t know if their ATS was capable of that, over 50% didn’t if, when, or how a candidate’s consent was obtained or stored. Ten percent were certain their ATS did none of this. Yikes. This is compliance 101, people. And given the reams of often ambiguous clauses in the regulation, relatively easy to patch.

If you’ve got your candidate-facing front-end covered, it’s time to look at who exactly has access to the data you store. Our respondents scored a little better here, with 90% of them aware of access limits to the data stored on their ATS. However, 20% said they kept no log of who in their organization had access to the personal data at what time, and that’s a GDPR no-no.

While 72% of surveyed confirmed their ATS kept logs of interview feedback and recruiting notes throughout the hiring process – if not satisfying the GDPR demand for “transparency”, at least proof of operating on good faith, which the more overarching of regulations value highly. They know better than anyone how hard full compliance will be. The big problem here is that 61% said they didn’t know whether the same data sets were transferred to third party vendors, like payroll or onboarding applications. That’s a problem. It’s precisely this kind of hole that regulators will consider a data breach – and under GDPR, reporting a data breach is mandatory.

If you’re wondering about the compliance capability of your ATS, ask yourself whether your ATS allows you to

• Set access authorization policies to limit access to candidate data?
• Support limited access rights for Works councils?*
• Log changes in access rights?
• Limit cross-border data transfers, e. g. between the US and Germany?
• Provide a process to map data transfers?

In regards to candidate data processing, does your ATS

• Keep a record of processing activities in place?
• Destroy, erase or anonymize candidate data when no longer legally required?
• Comply with regional data retention limits or specific legislation, if there should be any? Let candidates exercise the right to update their data by themselves?
• Fulfill right to be forgotten (RTBF) requests?
• Analyze all of the personal data you store and process to improve data governance? Map all processing activities in order to identify all processors incl. third parties (in EU and in third-party countries)?

For data security, can your ATS provide

• A written Data Processing Agreement (DPA)? Incident management policies?
• A data recovery policy?
• Secure data backups?
• Notifications to inform you and your candidates of data breaches?
• A Data Protection Officer registered within the EU to oversee security-related issues?

If your palms are starting to sweat a bit, your ATS provider should, legally, have all the answers you seek, and if they don’t, well, don’t fall prey to the sunk-cost fallacy. Get out asap and sign on with an ATS vendor that knows what they’re doing.

We’re pretty sure we can recommend someone to help you with that.

Write to us at SmartRecruiters for your free GDPR-compliance assessment.

*A Works council is a body of employees elected to represent their fellow employees. Works councils exist in many European countries, including United Kingdom, Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, France and Spain.

According to tech guru Nick Macario, what’s powering Bitcoin-mania may soon disrupt Recruiting, by toppling Facebook and LinkedIn and returning ownership to individuals.

On February 5, 1637, the children of Dutch tavern-keeper, Wouter Bartelmiesz, gathered their late father’s possessions for a large auction in the town of Alkmaar. Among items up for bid was a small botanical collection that drew both the humble townsfolk and wealthy elite into the auction house. For many, the public event was pure spectacle. For the crafty, there were particular items promising outlandish, unprecedented wealth: tulip bulbs.

Newly introduced from Turkey to the Netherlands in the late 1500s, tulips became the day’s hottest industry. A poet at the time wrote of the Dutch tulip trade, “He who considers the profits that some make every year from their tulips will believe that there is no better Alchemy than this agriculture.”

Highly valued for their novel rarity, tulip bulbs were in high demand, encouraging many nascent investors to liquidate their assets and get on board with the lucrative but risky venture. Tulip prices swelled when certain specimens mutated, following an outbreak of the non-fatal mosaic virus that left irregular color patterns on petals. Garden centers around the lowlands scrambled to keep these rare flowers in stock, and between December 1636 and January 1637, their price increased twenty-fold. Speculation as to how much higher prices could go was rife. Tulips became a futures market.

At the Alkmaar auction, one buyer paid 21,000 guilders for a single lot. Enough to buy two large houses on Amsterdam’s swishiest waterway, the Keizersgracht, or Emperor’s Canal (where today, one floor of one of those canal houses easily goes for a million euros). In the span of a few hours, Wouter Bartelmiesz’s children went from poor orphans to exceptionally wealthy thanks to their late father’s collections, and just in time, too, as the tulip supply, racing to meet demand, soon began to outpace it.

A matter of weeks after the auction, determined sellers were flooding the market, creating a domino effect of lower and lower prices that sent many remorseful buyers into a panic, and any remaining prospectors running for the dunes. In a pattern that has played out several times since, with few takers and an oversaturated supply, the market imploded. So badly that the federal government was forced to intervene, mediate, and settle disputes.

“Tulip mania” is generally considered to be the first speculative bubble in modern Western history. Today, many consider investing in Bitcoin to be the latest.

The current controversy around the world’s most well-known cryptocurrency shares “many of the elements of tulip-bulb mania,” said Citadel CEO Ken Griffin, remarking on the record price of nearly $20,000 a coin in late 2017. Value dropped dramatically between December 2017 and February 2018, and despite a slight increase in March of this year, current price trackers illustrate a diminishing trend.

“All the speculation between cryptocurrency prices cause people to ultimately question how there’s no physical object backing the value,” says Nick Macario, co-founder of dock.io and CEO of Remote.com.

While the risks of investing in commodities like gold and silver — to say nothing of tulip bulbs — are well known, Macario identifies an important distinction: “People accepted gold as the currency standard because it’s a physical object. They feel there’s an explanation for why gold can have a value. However, that worth is disconnected from its utility as gold.”

To adrenaline-jacked trader types, it doesn’t matter. To the skeptical or the parsimonious, unseasoned newcomers are investing in technology few can even explain. At least with tulips, everyone agreed that they were beautiful flowers worthy of admiration. What Bitcoin is, the nuts and bolts that make it work, are almost too abstract to explain fully here. So we won’t. Not just yet.

That’s where futurists like Macario come in. A serial founder who’s launched four companies and honorably exited two, he’s here to demystify the technology powering Bitcoin-mania, the bulb of the thing, if you will. It’s called blockchain, and “it’s sometimes referred to as a pyramid scheme,” says Macario. “There’s a lot of mistrust because many people don’t, fundamentally, understand it. Blockchain technology is not only for cryptocurrency, although that’s the most widely used application for it.”

Macario is using blockchain to power his most recent venture, dock.io, launched this year, which connects millions of job seekers on a decentralized network, one he says will rival Facebook and LinkedIn, only without limitations to user-data mobility.

The way things work now, professionals build extensive profiles, reputations, and experiences on closed business and social networking platforms like Facebook, Reddit, LinkedIn, even Twitter. But what happens when you decide to shift your personal information onto another network? It can’t be done.

Macario insists blockchain holds huge potential beyond cryptocurrency or freeing your data from Facebook. Macario insists, perhaps unexpectedly, that blockchain is about to disrupt the recruitment industry.

Imagine: when you update your profile with a new job title, it automatically syncs and updates everywhere at once, across all platforms, saving you time and optimizing your online processes. dock.io also expedites recruiters’ manual tasks like conducting background checks. For candidates, deciding which applications can access your data is as simple as toggling notifications on or off.

“We’re empowering the user tremendously,” says Macario. “We’re going to build the largest, most complete resource of data about an individual in existence.”

Given the current climate of massive data leaks and growing concerns over the sale of browsing histories to advertisers, Macario’s claims of freely sharing profiles across the net may sound undesirable, but the ledger records on the blockchain are both continually updated across the peer-to-peer network, and protected by a layer of cryptography distributed across many points, or “nodes”. Any unauthorized changes would require massive amounts of computing power to access the controlling majority (at least 51%) of nodes, and modify them simultaneously. The bigger the network, the more difficult this becomes.

Though the dock.io network may still be in its infancy, it’s scaling rapidly and gaining buzz. This February, dock.io completed its Initial Coin Offering (ICO) — the cryptoquivalent of an IPO — raking in over $20m via DOCK token sales. These tokens decide how data is accessed and shared across the dock.io protocol. Transactions of data exchange between applications and users on dock.io incur a token cost. This token exchange also works to ensure the quality of data, as applications are only rewarded tokens when other applications validate the same data on their networks. DOCK tokensalso grant the holder influential votes over the future direction of the protocol as dock.io scales up in the coming months, much like a shareholder in a traditional company structure.

“We could create a powerful network that helps applicant tracking systems and other CRM systems,” says Macario, “because they have more enriched data to build more and better features, recruit better, and make better decisions.”

*****

Like other blockchain acolytes, Macario’s exhortations bear the burden of public proof. But Macario knows that even when broken down into its most basic elements, blockchain theory is about as punchy as reading a Samsung TV instruction manual. In Korean. But this is tech that may change your life sooner than you think, so let’s try.

A blockchain is an encrypted digital ledger of records, organized into blocks. These blocks are located on servers called nodes, with any nodal computer connected to the network and linked to others, like a chain. Each node maintains a copy of said ledger and informs other nodes of newly submitted or newly verified transactions, allowing information to be distributed securely across an entire network without the need for a central administrator. This is possible because blockchain transactions contain their own proof of validity and authorization, instead of requiring a centralized application.

Blockchain’s distributed database syncs data along all nodes in the chain and protects them with advanced cryptography, meaning that all data on the chain is transparent and immutable. By nature of its decentralized network, the blockchain is extremely difficult to hack, and global enterprises including Walmart, FedEx, UPS, British Airways, and Dutch transport company Maersk, use blockchain to track supply chains, streamline and secure international shipping, solve customer disputes, and standardize global trade and finance.

Even non-profits, fashion gurus, and musicians are integrating blockchain into their business practices. Great for Macario and his cause, likely awesome for recruiting; not so good for anyone waiting for the next Kanye single to leak.

For job seekers, blockchain’s value is clear. They own their data and can share it wherever and with whomever they please, on a secure, verifiable, and decentralized network. After the hiring process, blockchain can protect employee data from falsification and unauthorized changes, since the data can only be modified with the approval of all links in the chain.

“Instead of controlling user data,” Macario suggests, “companies will realize that their model is creating a better network and a better offering. People can freely decide to use their platform, not because they are trapped there.“ Though Macario assures his end goal is to work with large platforms, he confidently claims, “We don’t need Facebook or LinkedIn to grow a huge network.”

Through direct signups, the dock.io network grows by 100k new users each month. Not much compared to Facebook’s 2.2 billion or LinkedIn’s 500 million last quarter, but “where we start to scale is through partnerships with companies like SmartRecruiters,” says Macario. “There are 12 million job seekers a year who are not yet in the dock.io network. When we start integrating them, and then plug into hundreds of other networks, we can scale to build a bigger network than LinkedIn, and do it without LinkedIn.”

Though the balance of internet power could fluctuate in the wake of upcoming data privacy legislation, both in the US and abroad, until data control returns to the hands of individuals, Macario won’t be happy, and we won’t necessarily be safe. But dock.io looks to be instrumental in moving the needle towards empowering individuals world-web-wide and debasing the systems of power that give companies like Facebook enough control to keep a scandal like Cambridge Analytica out of the press for so long.

So as long Bitcoin and others like it remain more an abstraction than something to pay for your groceries with, the cryptocurrency market will remain unstable. But instead of fixating on the tulip-bulb nature of the technology’s fluctuating stock, Macario seeks to understand how the not-so-abstract value of blockchain can herald something as stable as the second-coming of the gold standard.

“It’s just a matter of who’s controlling the data,” he says. “I think eventually it’s going to be the user, and I hope we can do that in the short term. Data will always be the most valuable resource.”